IBM Sequoia is one of the IBM BlueGene supercomputers. The first computer to sustain 10 petaflops of performance, it lives at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan is home to no. 4 on the list, Fujitsu’s K Computer. The computer uses a proprietary interconnect called Tofu, and its OS is based on the Linux kernel.
Mira, another IBM BlueGene supercomputer, is installed at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The computer was supported, in part, by the United States Department of Energy.
The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Switzerland is home to Piz Daint, the most powerful computer system in Europe. Piz Daint is a Cray XC30 and is one of the most energy efficient supercomputers, consuming a mere 2.33 MW of power.
Shaheen II, a product of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, was put to work in 2015. The original Shaheen system was an IBM BlueGene system, but the Shaheen II is a Cray XC40 system.
Leave it to the University of Texas, Austin Longhorns to name a supercomputer Stampede. It’s a Dell PowerEdge C8220 system working out of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the university.
Another IBM BlueGene machine, the JUQUEEN, is installed in Germany.
Taking its namesake from Mr. Spock’s home planet, the Vulcan supercomputer system is also out of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is used to operate in tandem with its roommate, Sequoia.
Conner is a former Senior Editor for TechRepublic. He is now a Senior Research Analyst at 451 Research.
